International Panel on Exiting Violence Michel Wieviorka: IPEV can make exiting violence an integrated research area

Michel Wieviorka at the IPEV Kick-Off in January 2017: "IPEV should contribute to making exiting violence a relatively integrated research area".

Violence has long been an area of particular focus within the human and social sciences. Exiting violence has been much less focused on, and IPEV should contribute to making this a relatively integrated research area. If the intention is to broaden the issue of “exiting violence”, and to consider everything that might lead to its reduction or prevention, this means recognising that it is a fractured field, devoid of unity, in which there is much more input from experts, professionals and activists of all stripes than from researchers per se.

This field stretches from the most private, the individual – victim or perpetrator, for instance – with their subjective outlook, to the most global or general, the geopolitics of the Middle East, for example. Straight way, there is an issue that begs to be discussed.

It might even be stated in the form of a paradox.

In order to explore the issue of how to exit violence, the conditions that make it possible and the forms such an exit can take, we must surely have an understanding of that violence itself: its social, religious, cultural, economic, political causes – the environment in which it emerged. At the same time, it would be naive to believe that the way to exit or put an end to such violence was to merely reverse back along the same path that caused it, to put in place mechanisms or processes that appear to simply balance out the ones produced it in the first place. Violence must be understood, and at the same time there must be a recognition that exiting violence involves specific solutions. In other words, the issue of how to exit violence must be treated as a distinct topic, notwithstanding the fact that it is so directly affected by violence, apparently so utterly dependent on it, that conceiving of the issue independently from the question of violence itself seems impossible.

Michel Wieviorka: IPEV can make exiting violence an integrated research area
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News & Politics	Upload TimePublished on 24 Oct 2017